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Look East policy: phase two
By C. Raja Mohan
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Phase two of the Look East policy will help break out of the political confines of the subcontinent that have severely limited India's strategic options.
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THE PRIME Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee's swing through Southeast Asia this week marks at once the triumph of the Look East policy launched nearly a decade ago by the Congress Government under P.V. Narasimha Rao, and its advancement into a new phase. Some of the foreign policy moves led by the Vajpayee Government have invited criticism from the Opposition parties, and there will be a new edge to that debate as the next general elections draw closer. But the unstinting support of all the Governments in the last decade to the Look East policy reflects both the continuity in Indian diplomacy over the last decade and a half, and a significant measure of bipartisan consensus on the new orientation of foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.
A seeming contradiction is often constructed between the Nehruvian roots of Indian foreign policy and the alleged departures from it in the recent past. Whether that contradiction is real or not, a political irony confounding this debate lies in the fact that the recent changes in the Indian foreign policy have made many of the ideas of the Republic's founding fathers more tangible now. Take for example the notion of Asian solidarity that animated Indian foreign policy from the very dawn of Independence.
Despite a lot of rhetoric about Asian solidarity in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it never materialised, thanks to the impact of Cold War politics on the region, and, to a lesser extent, the tensions between India and China. There was little commercial cooperation among the Asian countries and their trade linkages were oriented outwards. Today that vision of Asian solidarity is being realised in an unexpected way through increased economic cooperation within the great continent. The dramatic growth of the Asian economies in the last few decades and increasing integration between them has resulted in many new far-reaching ideas being discussed today. These include the creation of an Asian economic community and a common currency for Asia, similar to the Euro.
This remarkable transformation was underlined by the External Affairs Minister, Yashwant Sinha, in his speech at Harvard University last month. Talking about India's new initiatives in Asia, Mr. Sinha said, "in the past, India's engagement with much of Asia, including Southeast and East Asia, was built on an idealistic conception of Asian brotherhood, based on shared experiences of colonialism and of cultural ties. The rhythm of the region today is determined, however, as much by trade, investment and production as by history and culture. That is what motivates our decade-old Look East policy. Already, this region accounts for 45 per cent of our external trade." Asia mattered only verbally in the past articulation of Indian foreign policy. It now is a throbbing commercial reality behind India's diplomacy.
Increasing flows of trade within the region over the years and the determination to deepen them further through more liberal arrangements have boosted the prospects for the emergence, for the first time, of an Asian economic community. The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) is negotiating free trade arrangements with China, Japan, South Korea and India. New Delhi has worked overtime to complete the framework agreement on free trade between India and the ASEAN. For Indian commercial diplomacy, widely seen as a slow-boat, the finalisation of this agreement within a year is a remarkable achievement.
When Mr. Rao outlined India's Look East policy a decade ago, it was tentative and greeted with some scepticism within the country and in Southeast Asia. During the Cold War, India and ASEAN drifted apart, and the Look East Policy sought to reconnect economically to the region. As India's economic reforms unfolded, there was no let-up in the pace of diplomacy towards the region, which saw steady gains throughout the last decade. Neither the controversial Indian nuclear tests of 1998, nor the economic crisis in East Asia in the late 1990s, came in the way of rapid expansion of India's relations with the region. Trade between India and ASEAN has multiplied fourfold — from $ 3.1 billion in 1991 to about $ 12 billion in 2002. Mr. Vajpayee has now set an ambitious target of $ 30 billion by the year 2007. The free trade agreements with the ASEAN as a whole and individually with Thailand and Singapore are part of the new ambitions of the Indian policy towards Asia.
The intensification of the economic linkages with ASEAN, as Mr. Sinha pointed out at Harvard, has quietly led India into a second phase of its Look East policy. Phase one of the policy was characterised by trade and investment linkages. Phase two according to Mr. Sinha is marked by "arrangements for FTAs and establishing of institutional economic linkages between the countries of the region and India." In his recent speeches, Mr. Sinha has also underlined a number of other features that define Phase two of India's Look East policy.
One is the larger geographic scope of the initiative — from the initial focus on Southeast Asia to include East Asia and South Pacific. Phase two, Mr. Sinha says, "is characterised by an expanded definition of `East' extending from Australia to China and East Asia with ASEAN as its core." South Korea has emerged as a major economic partner of India; while economic ties with Japan need to be upgraded, there has been dramatic growth in Sino-Indian linkages in the last few years. And the potential with Australia and the South Pacific remains to be tapped fully.
The other, according to Mr. Sinha, is the movement away from exclusive focus on economic issues in phase one to a broader agenda in phase two that involves security cooperation, including joint operations to protect sea lanes and pooling resources in the war against terrorism. The military contacts and joint exercises that India launched with ASEAN states on a low key basis in the early 1990s are now expanding into full-fledged defence cooperation. India has also quietly begun to put in place arrangements for regular access to ports in Southeast Asia. India's defence contacts have widened to include Japan, South Korea and China. Never before has India engaged in such multi-directional defence diplomacy in Asia.
Three other features can be identified as unique to the phase two of India's Look East policy. First is the pursuit of physical connectivity to Southeast Asia. With little trade with Southeast Asia during the Cold War, the consciousness that the region was part of India's extended neighbourhood melted away. And there was no reason to think of transport links to Southeast Asia. Establishing air and land links to East and Southeast Asia has become integral to phase two of the policy. As part of its road diplomacy, India is now actively building transport corridors to the region. These include the trilateral highway project involving Myanmar and Thailand and the proposed rail link between New Delhi and Hanoi.
Secondly, and of far more consequence, the Look East policy in phase two has opened the door for the first time since Independence to break out of the political confines of the subcontinent that have severely limited India's grand strategic options. The Look East policy has allowed India to break the artificial political barriers between the subcontinent and Southeast Asia. A summit of s of a new economic grouping called BIMSTEC will bring five nations of the Subcontinent (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka) together with two countries from Southeast Asia, Myanmar and Thailand, with a view to promote regional cooperation. With this, India will be in a position to finally trump the veto that Pakistan has exercised over economic cooperation in the subcontinent through the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
Finally, it has often been argued that India's Look East policy was driven, at least in part, by an ineluctable rivalry with China. While competition of a kind is a reality, the last couple of years have brought out the possibilities for Sino-Indian cooperation. India's Look East Policy in phase two is not driven by a fear of China nor a desire to become a frontline state against it. The focus of bilateral relations, as outlined during Mr. Vajpayee's visit to China in June, is on solving long-pending bilateral problems on a pragmatic basis and fully exploiting the new opportunities for bilateral economic cooperation.
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